So as Brightrock announced in their WftO blog, Steam will be adding support for more currencies, expected later this year.
I’m mostly interested in Eastern European regional prices (namely, Ukraine and Poland), but I guess I’m not the only one wondering about how it’ll be.
Just to take a look at the current state:
In a nutshell, many EE countries that have no special “regional” price applied to them use “CIS” settings (stupid, I know, most of them aren’t even in CIS, but that’s how Steam does things).
Meaning, when in Russia Stonehearth costs less than 8$ in Ukraine and Poland it costs 25$ (not sure about Poland but I guarantee in UA it is exactly that). Needless to say, since Russia and Ukraine are roughly equivalent in terms of salaries USD-wise, it makes a huge difference.
All and all, it doesn’t concern me directly (bought the game a long time ago) but I guess it does matter to other potential buyers in these new regions with new currency.
As far as I know, regional prices are assigned by developers and publishers (post by Brightrock Games strongly suggests that). So I wonder if Radiant is going to react to the news accordingly.
Oh man, these things are so complicated…
Here in Brazil, our money (called Real) is worth 1/3 of a dollar. So one would expect that the game would be around R$75, but it is actually way cheaper, just R$45.
For some reason, Steam has locked our currency with a value of 1/2 of a dollar, for a very long time now. Last year, at the peak of the corruptions and political problems here in our country, our money had plumed to almost 1/5 of a dollar, and Steam didn’t updated the rate. So I really don’t understand how they can earn the money we pay. For the R$45 price, that would be equivalent to just ~$10 dollars.
turns out that a lot of things are priced much cheaper in other countries. I’m pretty sure microsoft has done this for decades and thats why keys are like $10 on third party websites because they are buying them in other countries where the normal price would mean no one could afford it.
basically it comes down to cost of living. here you can buy 1 loaf of bread for like $1 but in other countries that would buy you much more. so of course you wouldn’t expect them to be willing to pay the same price when it has more value in other areas
Brightrock also mentioned Steam suggested to revise other regional prices, so prices for Brazil may change as well. I guess it all depends on how devs and publishers decide to follow Valve’s suggestions. This blog post indicates they have some room for decisions in each particular case.
As far as I know, regional prices can be assigned by publishers, but don’t have to. If you don’t have set a price, Valve’s recommendation takes over. Brightrock Games’ post also kinda dipped into that.
It’s important to note that the price of a game is not merely decided by purchasing power or currency exchange ratios, but also by other factors as well. For example, you also have to take into consideration your target group and its possible market. For example, if you know that a country is not really into gaming, or has little issues with piracy (both law enforcement-wise and culturally), pricing your game at the equivalent price isn’t going to fly. You’ll need to lower the price in order to become more attractive.
If you know that your target audience is mostly poor students in a country, you’ll need to lower the price as well. If you know that the potential buyers are somewhat well off, so could pay more, but are also choosy with their money, you’ll refrain from rising the prices over there - because they would just jump to the competition, or not purchase a product at all.